158 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 



"Could I have acted otherwise?" 

 "Could a supernatural prophet foretell my acts?" 

 Of course the will is the personality, or total character, and freedom 

 does not require that I should have two characters, but merely that I 

 should fully express the one that I truly am. . 



The geometrical diagram of coming to a decision, wherein we see 

 a road with two branches, is entirely spatial and false. There are 

 not two roads, nor even two tendencies, but a self which keeps on enduring 

 and ultimately wills and acts. It develops through its very hesitations 

 and painful struggles, until the ripe fruit drops from the tree. 



Both determinists and libertarians have erred in speaking of two 

 paths. At the time of deciding, there is always one: they see it dead, 

 not living. 



As for absolute prophecy, Bergson answers that to know completely 

 the antecedent conditions of any action would be to perform that 

 action — nothing short of this would suffice. How can Peter know 

 the intensity of Paul's feelings ? The question is meaningless. It is 

 unreal because irrational. 



The Same State of Mind Never Recurs 



But determinism will make a final stand on the law that "the same 

 antecedents will always produce the same consequent." But the 

 essence of durationism is that the same slates never recur. Life is a 

 real progress — the character changes with every heart-beat, and we are 

 precisely all that we have endured. The repetition of a feeling makes 

 it different and utterly incalculable : the physicist deals with the same 

 weights over and over, but the deeper feelings are never twice the 

 same. If there is a law of cause and effect, it does not mean the same 

 to the real psychologist as to the physicist, because a deep feeling acts 

 once and never again. We cannot tell what a man will do in a given 

 case, because the case can never be really given, nor the man. Of 

 course, we can make very good guesses, especially where there is little 

 freedom or creative originality. 



Will someone now persist, after all, that an act is somehow bound 

 up in its antecedents ? It is then necessary to analyze the whole con- 



